- Title
- Modelling Holocene analogues of coastal plain estuaries reveals the magnitude of sea-level threat
- Creator
- Helfensdorfer, Anna M.; Power, Hannah E.; Hubble, Thomas C. T.
- Relation
- Scientific Reports Vol. 9, Issue 1, no. 2667
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-39516-4
- Publisher
- Nature Publishing Group
- Resource Type
- journal article
- Date
- 2019
- Description
- Hydrodynamic modelling of Australia’s lower Murray River demonstrates the response of a large coastal plain estuary to the mid-Holocene (7,000–6,000 yr BP) sea-level highstand. The approximately two metre higher-than-present sea level during the highstand forced the estuarine limit upstream generating an extensive central basin environment extending more than 200 kilometres from the river mouth (143 kilometres upstream of the modern tidal limit). The geomorphic history of the region does not conform to conventional estuarine facies models as, for much of the Holocene, the lower Murray River acted as a landward, gorge-confined extension of the Murray estuary. The incredibly low relief of this coastal plain system drove significant saline incursion and limited current velocities across the estuary facilitating deposition of a laminated silt-clay sequence which our results suggest may be regionally extensive. Variations to discharge, barrier morphology, or the estuary’s bathymetry result in minimal change to the estuarine palaeo-environment. The shift to the present-day fresher water distribution in the Murray estuary requires a fall in sea level to present-day conditions. The dominance of sea level as the controlling factor on this estuarine palaeo-environment highlights the significant potential impact of climate change induced sea-level rise to coastal plain estuaries.
- Subject
- Holocene; estuaries; sea-level; palaeo-environment; SDG 13; Sustainable Development Goals
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1443334
- Identifier
- uon:41962
- Identifier
- ISSN:2045-2322
- Rights
- This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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Goal 13: Climate Change
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